In the fall of 2006, editors for the Windows network of sites from TechTarget -- SearchWinIT.com, SearchExchange.com, SearchWindowsSecurity.com, SearchWinComputing.com and SearchSQLServer.com -- invited companies in the Windows market to nominate their products for the Products of the Year 2006 awards. To be eligible for consideration, a product had to have been introduced or significantly upgraded between Sept. 30, 2005 and Oct. 1, 2006. For previously available products, the upgrade must have incorporated major new features that were designed to meet new or evolving needs in the marketplace.

We looked at products in 15 categories -- Active Directory, Group Policy, messaging archiving and compliance, messaging backup and recovery, messaging security, messaging reporting and management, patch management, end point security, anti-x, server monitoring tools, remote control software, disaster recovery, database backup and recovery, database performance and tuning and general database utilities. Each category had its own set of judges, who rated the products in six categories -- innovation, performance, ease of integration into environment, ease of use and manageability, functionality, value, and service and support. We then tallied the judges ratings separately and aggregated them with those of the other judges to come up with a single numerical score.